Brand Content Marketing Growth Requirement Just Doubled

Imagine if your business had competitors that doubled every two years. Not the size of your existing industry competition, but the total number of competitors within your space. Could you imagine the impact that would have on your brand, your marketing and the sheer volume of activity required to sustain your brands market position, let alone make real sales and revenue gains. This is a real metaphor for content marketing growth and the daunting requirements of content production facing brands today.

If you look at the numbers, daunting might be a huge understatement when describing the required content creation levels marketers are faced with. The volume of content being generated has elevated to a staggering level. In fact, brands, marketers and consumers are creating so much content at this point that the total combined digital universe doubles every two years. You read that correctly. Every two years the total amount of digital content that exists in the world doubles!

So what does that mean for brands? How much content should brands be creating?

Frankly, it should mean a whole lot to companies that are either using content marketing now or planning to get into the digital content creation space more seriously. Let’s break it down.

Content Marketing Growth Requirement

Based on recent research by Accenture on digital content, there are some very important data points brands really need to understand. As stated above, we now know that the amount of content being created is at volumes never seen before, but that has a direct impact on brands that are trying to be effective with digital content, in that the amount of content they need to be creating themselves is also increasing. Why you ask? It’s really simple math.

By simply maintaining your brands current content creation levels, you will end up gaining a lesser impact as the total amount (or competing amount) of digital content that exists doubles. Mind you, that’s the case if you just want to maintain the existing reach, traction and exposure of your brand content online.

The hard truth is this. You’re likely going to have to increase your content creation output well beyond double what you are doing now if you hope to increase and improve your net results over the next two years. We are not just talking about blog posts here, but multi-channel content specifically designed for various platforms, networks, channels and devices.

Are you beginning to understand how daunting the content volume requirements are and how they are going to impact your resources, budgets and results?

Business Content Marketing Stats

Here are some of the key supporting data points that I was referring to earlier. If some of these facts derived from a survey of over 1,000 executives from 17 countries and 14 industries doesn’t put the fear of God into your marketing spirit, not much will.

100% of marketing leaders said digital content is valuable for meeting business objectives.

I hope the impact of that statistic just sank down into your soul. If you are a tech startup, B2B or SaaS executive, I want you to remove your heart-felt beliefs about your brands content marketing for a moment and think competition. If your competitors understand these facts and can out execute you with content, you have a real problem moving forward.

53% of executives say that they produce most of their content locally, while 83% said they will likely produce more globally within 2 years.

I have a newsflash for you. Keeping your content production in-house or at the corporate silo level is going to be a big problem for you in the very near future. Marketing and corporate silos will not be able to keep up with the content volume requirements. You are going to need to utilize out of corporate resources to scale your content creation, production and distribution. That means you are going to have to be leveraging additional internal departments, resources and staff, as well as utilizing external professionals to get the job done.

83% of the executives expect that their current moderate to enormous content creation volume will continue to escalate over the next two years.

If your B2B content marketing does not have a plan to meet these content marketing level requirements of the future, I have news for you, your competition will. It is hard enough for SaaS and B2B brands to make massive industry changing pivots to their marketing resources, talent and budgets knowing what the future looks like, let alone trying to play catch up when you didn’t plan ahead. In business, two years is like the blink of an eye, so you better get busy.

What Brands Need To Do About Their Content Marketing

I cannot more strongly implore B2B, SaaS or Startup brands to heed my words on this. Content is the backbone of your digital presence, marketing, lead generation, branding and ultimately sales and revenue. Your little lizard skeleton, no matter how big you think he is now, must be grown into a content tyrannosaurus rex machine! That is the real example of the kind of scale that is going to be required moving forward.

Whatever you currently think is a ridiculous content creation volume that your brand is attempting to reach, you need to think again. You actually need to double or even triple the content marketing volumes you believe to be unattainable today. That should be your new target.

Add Top Talent

Just as the content creation volume requirements have increased, so will your talent base need to increase. But let’s be very clear about what I mean by “talent”. Many startups and brands tend to utilize more inexperienced staffers or admin team members to take on content creation. Additionally, many B2B and SaaS brands tend to over-utilize their team members by adding content creation to their already overwhelming workloads, when content is not their expertise.

Serious brands are going to have to utilize experienced content marketing consultants as well as hire professional writers, graphic designers and video professionals both as internal employees AND external partners. If you intend to scale your content volumes and do it with high-end content that gets results, you need to recognize that you have no choice. If you are expecting your current in-house staff resources and experience will be able to handle double or triple the amount of content creation for your brand, you don’t understand what goes into creating good content and need to address that misunderstanding yesterday.

Build Strategy Within Processes

At the core of scaling your content marketing volume and execution will be strategy. You are going to need a highly detailed and sophisticated road map that defines your content creation, the channels, the platforms and content production requirements, among about 100 more details we are not going to be able to cover here.

The strategic content road map that is created will need to be concrete enough to have clear focus, but flexible enough to move on a dime as market conditions, news or other business events require it to. Furthermore, the entire strategy will need to fit within clearly defined processes that ensure quality and efficiencies that can scale rapidly.

Integration

Finally, an incredible amount of attention and planning must be brought to bear related to integrating the overall strategy and content production that facilitates multiple channels. You’ll need to also integrate your content distribution methodology into your existing lead funnel as it exists across all platforms and properties if you are going to see the fruit of your labor.

As content marketing continues to escalate the required volumes, channels and media types for B2B, Startup and SaaS brands, there will need to be leadership within your organization that not only sees the writing on the wall, but actively transforms your company to meet these content requirements through planning and strategic investment.